Many years ago, when I was a college student in London, I sat in the visitors’ gallery of the House of Lords and heard Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, make a speech in favor of a bill to make certain reforms in that institution. “My Lords,” he declared, “this occasion reminds me of a hymn that we no longer sing: ‘There is room for new creations in that other house above.’”

These days, it appears that there is unlimited room for new creations in that other house above. On March 7, the House of Commons voted in favor of an elected House of Lords.

Nothing startling about that to Americans. We have been directly electing U.S. senators since 1913. But America has a federal system. We have an upper chamber for the obvious reason that it protects the smaller states from being swamped by the larger.

But what is the purpose for an upper chamber in a parliamentary system like Britain’s?

The usual reason advanced for an upper chamber in any democracy is that it saves democracy from itself. In other words, it acts as a brake on the passions of the moment and blocks, or at least delays, the passage of hasty and ill-considered laws.

The question that the British people must now ask themselves is whether an elected upper chamber will perform that role more effectively than a chamber filled, as it now is, partly by heredity and partly by appointment.

The House of Lords was once a citadel of privilege. You inherited your seat in the Lords from your ancestors. Or, if you were a commoner elevated to the peerage, you passed your seat to your descendants. Then, in the late 1950s, the government began creating “life” peers, who held their titles and their seats in the Lords for their lifetimes only, and could not pass them on to their heirs.

The advantage of life peers was that eminent people from the arts, the sciences and the professions could be elevated to the Lords and provide the government with expert advice on pending legislation. Hereditary and life peers, sitting side by side, acted as a council of tribal elders. An eccentric arrangement, to be sure, but one that often worked surprisingly well. There was no deadlock between the two houses of Parliament, because with the creation of life peers, the party that controlled the Commons could automatically assure itself a majority in the Lords.

Then, in 1999, Prime Minister Tony Blair cleared out most of the hereditary peers, and filled the vacancies with party hacks who were widely derided as “Tony’s cronies.” Currently, a brewing scandal over the alleged sale of peerages proved to be the last straw for many MPs. So, by a significant majority of 113, the Commons voted to wipe the slate clean and start over with second chamber that is wholly elected.

The problem is that no one has yet decided what the powers of the elected second chamber will be, or what, exactly, it will represent. Nor does anyone yet know what it will cost the taxpayers to make the change. One Labor peer estimates that it will cost over a billion pounds.

Will it be worth the price?

British journalist Quentin Letts, expressed his doubts in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal. “The horrid truth,” he wrote, “for all this talk of democratic principle, is that the dotty, dusty House of Lords was cheap to run, gave the country a sense of history and worked pretty well. Even Mr. Blair's patsies, when they arrived, started to exercise some independence of mind. Being from the center-left, they also loved their titles.”

It may be that the best solution for what to do with the Lords was made as far back as 1882 by another British institution –- the comic opera duo of Gilbert and Sullivan. In his libretto for their opera Iolanthe, Gilbert proposed that membership in the House of Lords be determined by competitive examination. Gilbert meant the suggestion as satire, but it would be one way of combining modern democracy with a government of all the talents.